Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking your CPU means operating your CPU and motherboard outside of their design specifications, it can cause damage to them or kill them and may void their warranties depending on the manufacturer’s policies!
When it comes to Sandy Bridge-E, overclocking can be more exciting than Sandy Bridge and socket 1155. With Sandy Bridge there are two or three settings you have to worry about in order to set your overclocks and other settings did not make a bunch of difference. However, with Socket 2011 you can take the route of Sandy-Bridge or you can venture off and tweak tons of different things. One of the greatest advantages is being able to set multipliers for Base-clock. With Sandy Bridge you are more or less limited to 110-base clock as a maximum. With SB-E you can hit much higher base clock frequencies.
Stock speeds of the 3930K are 3.2ghz, however this board would not run those speeds even with turbo turned off. Thus testing was done at 3.5ghz. For most people that would be more than enough, but for others they want the speeds of 4.0ghz and higher.
If I had access to extreme cooling such as Dry Ice or liquid nitrogen I would have posted much higher speeds. But as-is I do not want to kill my processor with excessive voltages.
For this review I stuck to 1.45v as a limit since that is more than what most people would consider safe for daily clocks. If you have sufficient cooling 1.4v should be fine for daily use, but I would not advise going much over that unless you have heavy-duty watercooling.
Keep in mind that every processor is different so if I am able to hit certain clocks that does not mean you will be able to as well.
CPUz Info
At 1.45v I was able to do 4.7ghz. Quite impressive to say the least! The chip was even able to do 4.8 but sadly it crashed in Cinebench so I backed down a tad.
3Dmark Vantage
The fact that the CPU score is scoring around 10 points per megahurt of added frequency is great. The efficiency at higher frequencies is quite remarkable if you can keep the heat down.
MaxxMem
Memory performance increased around 33%! If that is not a boost in performance I do not know what is.
Cinebench 11.5
The fact that it takes over the 8-core, 16-thread beast is pretty darn awesome. Overclocking really helps this thing kick some butt.
Wprime
Whats that? 4second wprime 32m? Yes please. 110.11 seconds in 1024m is not too shabby at all either. I don’t miss the days of processors taking an hour to run 1024m.
For memory overclocking I was easily able to run over 2200mhz with these sticks on the UD3. However I will not be including those results since the Ballistix Elite review will be coming up soon!
